or maybe it is, so many love poems keep appearing in the blogs. Love poems are some of the hardest poems to write, or so claimed W. H. Auden. Here are a few classics that have inspired poets and lovers over the years:
- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe
- The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Ralegh
- somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by e. e. cummings
- To the March Wind by Chuck Guilford
- Let me not to the marriage of true minds by William Shakespeare
- The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell
- What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold
- A Birthday by Christina Rossetti
- How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Wild Nights — Wild Nights! by Emily Dickinson
- When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats
- Credo by Matthew Roher
A few suggestions: use concrete, specific images to show your feelings; avoid sing-song "roses are red" type rhyming; try to say something fresh and new that gives readers a new insight — or even a laugh.
And check out the following topics:
Poem #14: Follow a Metaphor
A metaphor makes a comparison, and in doing so shapes our perception. If we say, "Time is a river," we're noting a certain similarity between the two. Yet we know they aren't identical. We may mean that time is fluid, has currents and eddies, empties into some vast ocean, but not that it's composed of water. If we say, "Time is a stone," we may mean it's silent, still, indifferent, but not that it's a mineral.
Read more ...Our best poems . . .
are authentic.
They come from a place inside of us that is real. They are spoken in our own voices and touch on matters that genuinely concern us.
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Rhythm and Meter
These are similar but not identical concepts. Rhythm refers to the overall tempo, or pace, at which the poem unfolds, while meter refers to the measured beat established by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. Poets who write free verse, generally de-emphasize or ignore meter and focus instead on refining and tuning their natural speech rhythms to suit the poem's tone and content. Or as Ezra Pound put it, they "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."
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